Transgender African-Americans’ Open Wound: ‘We’re Considered a Joke’

When Elle Hearns watched the video clip someone had sent to her on social media, it really stung.

It featured a black comedian, Lil Duval, on “The Breakfast Club,” a popular New York City-based morning radio show that caters to an African-American audience, joking that if a sexual partner turned out to be a transgender woman, he would want to kill her if she hadn’t told him beforehand.

Ms. Hearns is a black transgender woman who has devoted much of her life over the past few years to defending black people — mostly men — from the harassment, brutality and killings they face at the hands of the police. Yet here was a black man, interviewed by three black hosts, lobbing what Ms. Hearns felt was “an attack on the entire community.”

“I was ashamed, I was embarrassed, I was angry,” she said.

At the heart of Ms. Hearns’s pain is a betrayal that black transgender people say has long afflicted them.

With few exceptions, black transgender women and men say that they get more hatred from black people than anyone else, even though they have been on the front lines protesting issues that affect all African-Americans.

“I feel like we have been at the forefront with so many people fighting, and now that it’s time for people to be joining in our fight, no one’s there,” said Atlantis Narcisse, 45, the founder of Save Our Sisters, a support organization for black transgender women in Houston. “They will stand up for a drug dealer being killed or a black man being beaten, but won’t stand up for black trans women being murdered.”

Ms. Narcisse, a black transgender woman, said that she has received more support from whites, and that she is on edge around African-Americans because she does not think they will stand with her if she is attacked.

“We’re considered a joke,” she said. “They still look at us as men dressing up, playing in women’s clothes, which is not the case.”

Many black people’s views on transgender people come in part from the central role that religion and the church play in black life, several transgender people said. It also stems from an emphasis on hypermasculinity in black culture, which has deep roots in black men having to use physical strength to survive generations of oppression, they said.

“To be seen as feminine if you’re seen as a black male is a sign of weakness,” said Kiara St. James, the director of the New York Transgender Advocacy Group.

That attitude could mean grim consequences for black transgender people.